Guest Lecture by Prof. Eva Giloi on “Mapping Shame: Invectives and Urban Renewal in the Great Society”

On January 25, Associate Professor Eva Giloi from Rutgers University-Newark is giving a guest lecture titled “Mapping Shame: Invectives and Urban Renewal in the Great Society.”

When: January 25, 14:30-16:00 p.m.

Where: BZW/A 538

Prof. Giloi’s lecture focuses on how the invective of shame was used by power holders in 1960’s Newark to advance urban renewal. As part of their redevelopment projects, based on humanitarian ideals, urban reformers used the terminology of “urban blight,” as opposed to the related terms ghetto and slum, to naturalize victims of urban decline as powerless, and thus to force them into passive acceptance. In focusing on the affective regimes of shame which undergirded these racially-biased urban renewal projects, Prof. Giloi’s lecture explores how these projects contributed to Newark’s violent civil unrest in 1967, and it thereby expands on the root causes of larger violent protests which sprung up throughout American cities in the late 1960s. Mapping Shame draws on a variety of visual representations of shame and aspiration, as well as maps of Newark’s Central Ward and its depictions of the urban population’s mobility and fixity.

The lecture is hosted by subproject H of the new Collaborative Research Center 1285 on Invectivity. There is no entrance fee.